Sorry about that last little bit at the end of the last part of the story, I wasn’t looking where I was going, and I stepped up on a soapbox and let loose with a sermon. That’s the problem with writing a story instead of telling it. When you jump up on your high horse, there’s no one around to pull you down off from it no matter what you might be wanting to sermonize about or who might want to hear it or not hear it. You can’t read an audience when you’re writing to them, and I never could read other people very well anyway. We’ll see whether the editor leaves the moralizing in or decides to take it out. Lots of folks think that gambling on competitive sports is the most fun and excitement a person can have, and I never said that it couldn’t be fun and exciting, but I’m probably in the minority of those who think it may be the most evil and anti-social human activity ever. Whatcha gonna do?
So, I was up by the pavilion again, drinking my cold beer, smoking a name brand cigarette, and scanning the crowd, seeing who I knew, who I did not know, and who I might want to get to know later on, when I noticed that there was a whole line of vehicles coming through the darkness of the woods from up at the metal gate a looking like a string of cows with big yellow eyes headed nose-to-tail for the barn. Twilight had descended while I was standing up under the pavilion, and the bright brooder light had dimmed my eyes so that it looked nearly black outside the white circle that it cast, but I could still make out shadow of a man who was standing above the sandy berm saddle where cars could come over, and he walked down into the light beam of the first car as it approached and waved it on to his right into the parking area. The whole parade of vehicles, like mourners behind a hearse, followed that first one. I couldn’t see what kind of cars they were, but they seemed to be long, low-riding cars like old Caddies, Lincolns, and Impalas. Some of them scraped the sand with a loud hiss as the came up over the berm and high-centered. Considering the shape of the road down to the Pour Off, some of them had probably left mufflers, bumpers, and pieces of the oil pan all up and down the rocky trail. The fifth vehicle in the procession was a Ram pickup truck, blue as it turned out, with a barn shaped shed in the back. The shadow man stepped in front of the truck, walked around to the driver’s side, and pointed out some directions to the driver with his left hand. Then, the shady car director walked off into the darkness, and I couldn’t say for a fact if I ever saw that person again. Hell, I never saw him to know who he was then.
Anyhow, the Ram truck backed up to the front of the pavilion, and I could see the shed in the back was not a shed at all but a big doghouse. Painted across the top of the half-circle doorway in letters that were shaped and colored like flames were the words “El Diablo.” That’s The Devil in Mexican if you didn’t know.
The driver of the truck got out. He was dressed in a pair of white jeans with a red long-sleeved shirt tucked tightly into them so that there was not a wrinkle to be seen. Over the red shirt, he wore a black vest, and he had a black cowboy hat on his head. I couldn’t see it yet, but when he walked El Diablo into the ring, he had on shiny black cowboy boots. Other than that, he was your normal Mexican guy, not tall, fairly skinny, brown-skinned with a mustache that curved around his mouth and down to his chin. I have no idea what his name was, and it doesn’t matter one bit to this story. Matter of fact, neither does what he looked like, but I done told you, so I don’t think I can take it back now.
El Diablo had a rope around his neck that was red and silver. He didn’t have on a collar, but the rope was knotted into a noose, and the Mexican who led him kept the noose pulled close by walking beside him and holding the rope taut in his hand about two foot straight above the dog’s neck. You could tell that they had performed this act, this show, many times. It made me wonder what the dog’s opponent might think if he could see this display of practice and training. Would he respect the discipline? Hell, dogs don’t think about stuff like that, only humans, and many humans don’t know a thing about practice, training, discipline, or respect. Whatcha gonna do?
Anyway, El Diablo, like The Tiger, was an American pit bulldog. Like The Tiger, he weighed around hundred pounds. It had been thirty minutes since I had seen The Tiger in the arena, but I figured they were close matches pound for pound and inch per inch. El Diablo had a dark reddish-brown coat with a boot-shaped white stripe running from beneath his chin down to under his left front leg. I recall the white patch looked like Italy. You know, the European country. Unlike The Tiger, El Diablo had both floppy, triangular ears, and his short whip of a tail was stretched out full length, pointing to the sky as he strutted around the ring leading his Mexican handler. He didn’t have scars all over his body like The Tiger neither except the right side of his mouth had been torn away in a huge gash that circled his eye and curled into a pink skinned weal that went almost to his ear. If you only saw the one side of his head, you’d a thought he had a perpetual evil Joker smile. You know, the Joker from the Batman comic books not your normal deck of playing cards. I reckon that scarry smile is where he got his nickname. He looked wicked on the one side. If you only saw the other side, you would trust him to watch over your babies. That’s the devil’s trick, you know.
Anyway, El Diablo and the Mexican made three or four circles in the walled-up pit as people in the crowd “oohed” and “aahed” and clapped. The Mexicans from the cars had all walked up under the white light circle in a group about a dozen strong and gathered on the right side of the pavilion as I was looking at it from the Turkey Creek side. They were all men of various shapes and sizes, and all Mexicans with brown skin, coal black hair, and pencil mustaches. Most wore cowboy hats and long-sleeved shirts, and so they leaned against the splintery tops of the pallets without seeming to notice the scratch or prick. Some shouted out encouragement to the dog and the handler in Mexican. At least, I think it was encouragement. It could have been taunting or teasing, but I don’t think so. It sounded like cheering. One of the guys in this group that the others seem to gravitate to and glance toward to see how they should act looked like a young Danny Trejo. You know, the actor from movies like From Dusk Till Dawn, Heat, and Machete. He was probably in about a thousand more that I can’t think of, but, whether he played a good guy or a bad guy, he was always one tough looking hombre. This guy had that same look about him. He wasn’t big, maybe he was even a little below average height, and he didn’t look muscled up beneath his dark blue button up Western shirt, but he was obviously in good shape. The tough look about him was mostly in his face. It was scarred and pitted from chin to black hairline like he had been in a million fights, and, most of all, his black eyes had a “you-can-go-to-hell” look without a flicker of doubt that he could send you there in a hurry. If you have ever seen that look, you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, well, you’re probably lucky not to have encountered such a vicious man. Both Uncle Boog and I would like to have been so fortunate, Uncle Boog even more than me. I suppose I didn’t get nothing but a good scare.
The walk through was soon over for El Diablo who had not sniffed at nor pissed on anything during his introduction, and the fans and the bettors had seen both combatants of the main attraction for the night. El Diablo was lifted back into his house on the back of the Ram truck by his Mexican handler and another random, brown-skinned guy in a black cowboy hat, and then the truck pulled away into the darkness. By the reddish glow of the truck’s taillights and brake lights, I could see that the parking area was nearly full of cars in a horseshoe shape around the sides of the sandy berm all the way to the woods on the other side of the open area and down to the creek. No vehicles were parked on the slope up to the pavilion. When the truck lights went off, the world out there was swallowed up in blackness. Both El Diablo and The Tiger were out in there in the darkness somewhere, waiting to fight and to kill one another. But before that happened, both dogs would get a chance warm up on some lesser quality opponents, and it was The Tiger’s first contest of the night that was the first and last dogfight that I have ever witnessed, at least on purpose, and I’ll tell you all about that in the next part.
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